Ross MacDonald

Well, September is upon us once again, bringing with it the signs of change, as it always does. The playgrounds fall silent as the kids go back to their books and number 2 pencils, the long summer days grow shorter, leaves start to show a hint of color, and our thoughts turn to long cool nights filled with the cozy smell of gunsmoke and the unholy moans of the undead. Soon it’ll be time to board up the windows, gather the family around the hearth, roast some chestnuts, and give the old hogleg pistol a new coat of gunoil.

I built this pistol case as a wedding present for my friends and fellow zombie movie aficionados, Willie and Mikki. It may seem like a strange wedding present, but only if you haven’t met Willie and Mikki.

Now that the movie Jonah Hex has been in the theaters for a couple of weeks, I think it’s time to finally come clean and admit that I did some work on it. I have not yet had the pleasure of seeing it, so I have no idea if this piece made the final cut. I can tell you that Art Director Jonah Markowitz was great to work with, and I had a lot of fun with this one.

Jonah called me in March ’09, needing a wanted poster. A crew designer had already taken several runs at it, and the results were, I gathered, less than satisfactory. The one I saw was a kind of psychedelic Shepard Fairey wild west mashup. They wanted something that looked like the real deal. A friend on the crew recommended me—thanks Randy!

Jonah wanted to know a bit about wanted posters, so I told him what I knew, and soon he regretted asking…

In May I created a prop book for a movie currently in production. I’ve designed and created props for some big Hollywood blockbusters over the years, but this is decidedly not one of those, thankfully. It’s a small independent film by a first time writer/director named Steve Smith, starring unknowns. Hearing that was enough to get me intrigued, but when Steve sent me part of the script, I knew I had to work on this.

The working title for the film is “The House at the End of the Lane.” It’s set in the first half of the 20th century, starting out in 1918. It has elements of horror, occult, and mystery, but basically it’s a tragedy—the story of a man who has lost something so dear to him he will go to any lengths to regain it. He eventually sets in motion a series of events that leads to a catastrophe far worse than his original loss.